Rachel White
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New Year, Same You: Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail
After we’ve spent all our money on gifts and stuffed ourselves to the brim with endless holiday treats, it’s no wonder many of us see the new year as an opportunity to become a little less broke and little more fit. But come next December, most of us will find ourselves back in the same…
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America’s Ongoing Housing Crisis: Q&A with “Owned” Film Maker Giorgio Angelini
Fifty years after the passing of the Fair Housing Act, people across the United States continue to face an uphill battle to homeownership. “Owned, a Tale of Two Americas,” directed by University of Texas at Austin history alumnus Giorgio Angelini attempts to get at the root of the U.S. housing crisis, which erupted in an…
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Beyond the Battlefield: The war rages on, but this time it’s personal
The Thorazine haze was beginning to fade when Glenn Towery was discharged from Oakland Naval Hospital. For the last however-many days he had felt listless, “like a non-human being,” making him forget why he was even there in the first place. Before that, he occupied a hospital cot in the Philippines, next to an injured…
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Joan Neuberger: A Pioneer in Digital History
One of the most fundamental tasks for any university is to foster research that creates an impact beyond its campus. For historians, much of that work takes place in the growing fields of public and digital history. These scholars use innovative digital tools to make historical research relevant and accessible to a broader community. Now,…
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Here Comes the Song: The Personalities Behind Your Favorite Beatles Lyrics
If Paul McCartney would have written “Yesterday” based on the first words that came to his mind, the song would sound like a concupiscent teen singing about breakfast: Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs… The melody of the song, which has been broadcasted on American radio more than 7 million times…
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Professor’s Play “Monroe” Reveals the Ripple Effect of Racial Violence
If every action produces a series of consequences, imagine life if slavery or Jim Crow had never existed. Now, consider what has happened because they’ve existed.
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Decoding the Language of Love
“She looked at him through the light. She saw the pride and the interest on that handsome, poetic face, with the edgy cheekbones under the scruff, as he’d worked through the day without shaving. She saw both in his eyes, pure gray in candlelight.” –Excerpt from “Year One” by Nora Roberts The secret to romance…
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Four Reasons Everyone Should Study History
In the past, STEM and the arts and humanities have largely been taught as unconnected disciplines, but there is more overlap between fields than many realize. Erika Bsumek, an associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and a 2018 recipient of the Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Awards, wants to help students see how…
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The Future is Female: Young Women Inspired to take on NEW Leadership™ Roles
With more running for political office than ever before, women have moved beyond breaking ceilings and on to breaking records. But there’s still more work to be done. This year, more than 2,500 women filed for national- or state-level candidacy in a bi-partisan effort to increase female representation in politics nationwide, where women currently hold…
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Fight Like a Girl: How Women’s Activism Shapes History
Alice Embree doesn’t know what came over her the first time she stood up against injustice. She just knew it was the right thing to do. Along with her friends Karen and Glodine and the rest of the Austin High School drill squad, Embree had just sat down to order at a restaurant in Corpus…
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A Right to the City
Just south of Manor Road on Airport Boulevard, there’s a dimly lighted blues club where new and old East Austin meet. There, at the Skylark Lounge, local African American piano icon Margaret Wright plays happy hour on Thursday and Friday nights, giving city newcomers a taste of the bygone culture that once engulfed Austin’s eastern…
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Watch Your Step
Walking on natural terrain takes precise coordination between vision and body movements to efficiently and stably traverse any given path. But until now, vision and locomotion have been studied separately within controlled lab environments. To better understand how gaze and gait work together to help us navigate the natural world, UT Austin researchers combined new…
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Women’s Magic Hour: A Q&A Starring Donna Kornhaber
Since its humble beginnings at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929, when a seat cost a mere $5 (equivalent to roughly $72 today), the Academy Awards have celebrated the creative pursuits of some of history’s most notable characters. But in a year marked by controversy surrounding a disturbing number of sexual assault accusations and increasing…
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Where India Goes
UT Austin economist Dean Spears and sociologist Diane Coffey founded the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (r.i.c.e.) in 2011 with the goal of improving health and well-being in India. They focus on an important driver of economic development: the health of children. Despite rapid economic growth, India’s infant and under-five mortality rate continues to be…
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Damning the Amazon?
Hundreds of built and proposed hydroelectric dams may significantly harm life in and around the Amazon, according to research led by UT Austin scientists recently published in Nature. To meet energy needs, economic developers in South America have proposed 428 hydroelectric dams, with 140 currently built or under construction, in the Amazon basin — the largest and most…
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Fashion Meets Function
Though an avid cyclist, Gloria Hwang was never a fan of helmets, referring to them as “sci-fi” nuisances. But after losing a friend through a cycling accident, her perspective changed. Hwang, a psychology alumna, says her mission in founding and launching Thousand, a new brand of cycling helmets, was to save lives, noting that there are…
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Reckoning the Haint
Drea Brown made UT Austin history during the spring as the first doctoral candidate to defend a dissertation in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies. The department, founded in 2010 under the direction of associate professor and chair Edmund Gordon, was the first doctoral program in black studies in the southern U.S. Brown’s dissertation, “Hush…
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Doing the Right Thing
The Pro Bene Meritis award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts. Since 1984, the annual award has been given to alumni, faculty members and friends of the college who are committed to the liberal arts, have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits or have participated in service related to the college.…
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Telling a Good Story
The Pro Bene Meritis award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts. Since 1984, the annual award has been given to alumni, faculty members and friends of the college who are committed to the liberal arts, have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits or have participated in service related to the college.…
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An Educated Decision
Voter turnout in the U.S. is below turnout in most other advanced democracies, with only about 60 percent of eligible voters participating in the past four presidential elections and about 40 percent participating in midterm elections. While prior research indicates that those with higher levels of education are more likely to vote, new research shows…
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The “C” that Changed the Constitution
It took two centuries and one mediocre grade to ratify the 27th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In 1982, Gregory Watson stumbled upon a 200-year-old proposed amendment, written by James Madison, while researching a paper for his sophomore government class. It read: “No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives…
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Funding the Future
A $1.5 million gift will fund seven scholarships and contribute to the Marilyn Ann White Endowed Discretionary Fund, or “the tutoring fund,” for students in all three branches of the UT Austin Reserve Officers Training Program. The gift provides additional funding for the Lt. Col. Herbert C. White Jr. Leadership and Scholarship Fund, awarded to…
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Life is Learning; Learning is Living
Terry Orr jokes that pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in classical archeology in his late 70’s was all a ploy to avoid retirement. “A lot of people retire because they are tired of driving to the same office and dealing with the same people; but when you work for yourself, it’s different. You aren’t trying…
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Texas Book Festival Presents: “Dopers in Uniform” by John Hoberman
Since 1995, the Texas Book Festival has connected Texas authors with readers through literary panels and readings, book signings, demonstrations, live music, family-fun and local eats. This year at the festival, Germanic Studies Professor John Hoberman will present his third book on the social impacts of anabolic steroids, Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police…
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This Fool’s No Ghoul
On Halloween night, 13-year-old Rik Gern grabbed his wooden cane before setting off to trick-or-treat around the neighborhood as Charlie Chaplin. Delighted at the sight of a child festooned in a black bowler and matching mustache, families welcomed him inside to show off his foolproof impression to granny. “Look, Nana! Look who’s here to visit…
